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Einstein’s ‘God Letter’ from 1954 sells for $2.9 million

NEW YORK—A 64-year-old letter by Albert Einstein, known as the “God letter” because of its ruminations on formal religion, sold for almost $2.9 million in Manhattan on Tuesday.

Christie’s, the auction house that had estimated the letter would sell for $1 million to $1.5 million, said the page-and-a-half message went for $2,892,500 after a four-minute bidding battle between two clients on the telephone. Christie’s did not identify the winner.

Christie's auction house in New York City Tuesday sold a letter written by Albert Einstein in 1954 for $2.4 million. The letter gives a glimpse into the theoretical physicist's opinion of God.

It beat what Christie’s said had been the most valuable Einstein letter sold, a typed copy of his 1939 note to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Christie’s sold for $2.1 million in 2002. That letter warned of the possibility “of the construction of extremely powerful bombs” and served as a catalyst for research that led to the Manhattan Project.

Einstein, who was 74 when he wrote the God letter, was responding to a book by German philosopher Eric Gutkind titled Choose Life: The biblical Call to Revolt. Einstein used the letter to reject the idea of a God who plays an active part in everyday life, answering individual prayers. He also declared that he was anything but enthralled with Judaism, even as he said he was proud to be a Jew.

As The Times reported in previewing the sale of the letter:

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The God letter, written the year before Einstein’s death, seems to outline Einstein’s view of formal religion and the idea of a God who plays an active part in everyday life, answering individual prayers. “He did not believe in a God who went around choosing favourite sports teams or people,” Walter Isaacson, the author of the 2007 biography “Einstein”, said in an interview.

But at other times Einstein described himself as “not an atheist,” and the letter does not annul the seemingly spiritual characteristics of his thinking.

“Einstein often uses the word God — ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’” Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who teaches philosophy and wrote “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away,” said in an interview. “A lot of physicists do this. It misleads people into thinking they’re theists, they believe in God. It’s a metaphorical way of talking about absolute truth. Einstein used it metaphorically and playfully.”

She said he had been religious when he was a child but “lost his religion and science took over.”

Every time he was asked if he believe in God, he answered cagily: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s god,’” she said, referring to Baruch Spinoza, a 17th-century Dutch thinker who drew from Jewish religion and history. “If you say ‘I believe in Spinoza’s god,’ that’s already saying you don’t believe in what most people believe who believe in God believe. You believe the laws of nature are complete in themselves and contain all the answers.”

Peter Klarnes, a vice president at Christie’s, inspects Albert Einstein’s ‘God letter’, in New York, in November. The letter in which Einstein rejects the idea of a God who plays an active part in everyday life, answering individual prayers, sold for $2,892,500 after a four-minute battle between two telephone bidders. (HIROKO MASUIKE / The New York Times)

Gutkind had made the case in his book that “the Jewish soul is perfect intellectually as well as spiritually,” according to a review in Commentary magazine. “The mathematicized Einsteinian universe is Jewish as well as progressive, because it is anti-mythological.” Commentary also noted Gutkind’s “eagerness to find salvation for modern man in the Jewish spirit” (although the reviewer added that doing so induced Gutkind “to make the most extravagant claims in its behalf”).

Diana L. Kormos-Buchwald, a professor of history at the California Institute of Technology and the director of the Einstein Papers Project, said that Einstein was “not particularly thrilled at the special place that Gutkind devotes to Einstein’s science as the — how shall we put it — the best example of Jewish deterministic thought.”

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“The Jews are the only group to which he feels he could belong,” she said. “But he identifies with them because that is what he was born into, not because they are the chosen people.”

She summarized the letter as “a nice way” to tell Gutkind, “I don’t think like you and I don’t like what you’re saying.” She said that Gutkind’s book had mentioned Einstein 11 times “and holds up Einsteinian physics as the new overarching philosophy of the universe, of space and time.”

Einstein used the word “God” only once in the letter, but made clear that he and Gutkind saw religion differently.

“The word God is for me nothing but the expression of and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends,” Einstein wrote. “No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change anything about this.”

The letter apparently remained in the hands of Gutkind’s heirs until 2008 (he died in 1965), when it was auctioned for $404,000 in London. The buyer then was not identified. It went up for sale again, on eBay in 2012, for $3 million. A Christie’s spokeswoman said before Tuesday’s auction that it was not sold then and that the buyer in 2008 was the seller this time around.

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